Inevitably senior officials sometimes lacked political skills and were at sea after 1905 when forced to speak and propagandise for government policy in the Duma (parliament). In other respects they were sometimes all too politicaclass="underline" since ministers were senior officials and no real barrier divided politics and administration, officials had to be sensitive to policy, and to ideological and factional conflict at court and among the ministers simply in order to survive. Making a successful career in some parts of the civil service required not just hard work and professional competence but also caution, and the ability to acquire powerful patrons and to keep one's nose to the current political wind. When they actually reached top ministerial positions, the free-wheeling political skills they had honed during bureaucratic careers could, however, often serve senior officials well. Traditionally tsarist bureaucracy has had a very bad press from Russian aristocratic, liberal and radical critics, not to mention from Anglo-American historians. But from the origins of the modern Russian civil bureaucracy in the 1800s under the wing of Mikhail Speranskii down to 1917, the civil service produced many outstanding statesmen. A bureaucratic elite whose last generation produced men as diverse, imaginative and effective as Serge Witte, Petr Stolypin, Petr Durnovo and Alexander Krivoshein was something more than a Gogolean farce.[14]
In the imperial era the Russian elites, both aristocratic and bureaucratic, were part of a broader European elite culture and society. This was more true in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth, and it always tended to be most true the higher up the social ladder one travelled. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the Petersburg and Moscow intellectual elite, inevitably drawn overwhelmingly from the wealthier nobility, was developing its own variation on the theme of modern European literary culture.[15] In the nineteenth century it was to produce some of Europe's greatest musicians, poets and novelists. In general, education had high prestige among the nineteenth- century Russian elites, including among their wives and daughters. Given the extent to which the Russian elites drew on European models for everything from literary culture to fashionable dress and administrative modernisation, it was inevitable that they would attach a very high value to European languages. In certain respects educated Russian elites in the nineteenth century were indeed more 'European' than many of their peers in western and central
Europe in that they were better equipped to look at European culture in total and without some of the national blinkers of the French, English or Germans.
In cultural terms the nineteenth-century Russian elites were obviously far closer to Europe than to Asia. In fact, even if one goes back to 1700 and compares socioeconomic and political structures rather than cultures, one comes to the same conclusion. One good way to situate Russia on the global map is to make brief comparisons with the two other great empires in Asia at that time, namely the Ottoman Empire and China's Ching dynasty. In very many ways, comparing these three land empires provides rewarding insights for a Russianist, but it also underlines how much closer to Europe than to Asia the Russian elites were even in the Petrine era.
If, for instance, one looks at the Ottoman ruling group, the slave elite which governed the Ottoman Empire at its apogee had much in common with other ruling systems in the Middle East and very little in common with Russia. Even after the abolition of the devsirme the Ottoman elite was far from being an hereditary, military, property-owning nobility on the European (or Russian) model. The absence of monogamy and the existence of the imperial harem strongly differentiated Russian and Ottoman patterns ofinheritance andpower relations. So too did the absence in the Ottoman Empire of secure property rights to land. Already in the seventeenth century Russia was borrowing ideas and techniques from Europe. Quite apart from anything else, overt borrowing from an Islamic state would have been very difficult.23
In the case of the Chinese imperial tradition, one might argue that Chinese elites' strong identification with state service had some similarities with Russia. But the highly refined and self-confident secular high culture of Chinese elites had no equivalent in Petrine Russia. Nor did the cultural and ideological hegemony of the civil bureaucracy, and the latter's contempt for the brutal craft of war. In imperial Russian elite culture and society, officers, and especially Guards officers, always enjoyed far higher respect than the despised bureaucracy. One can indeed make some interesting comparisons between Russian elites and the Manchu military aristocracy which shared the rule of Ching China, so long as one remembers that in terms of mutual cultural awareness the two elites might as well have lived on separate planets. But even in structural-political terms, the position of an initially semi-nomadic conquest elite ruling over a culturally somewhat alien sedentary society has far more in common with the Mughal or Ottoman Empire than it does with tsarist
Russia.[16]
If Russian elites belonged unequivocally to Europe rather than Asia, they were nevertheless a very specific variation on the European theme. In certain respects their position vis-a-vis the crown was much weaker than in most of the rest of Europe. One illustration of the Russian monarchy's power concerns the lands of the Church. In Catholic Europe the Church usually held on to its lands into the nineteenth century. In Protestant countries ecclesiastical land was usually acquired by the landed elites as a result of the Reformation. In the Russian case, however, the state took over the Church's lands and held on to them. That was one reason why on the eve of emancipation more Russian peasants 'belonged' to the state than to private landlords.
The absence of feudal traditions, or at least of traditions which survived into the eighteenth century, is often and correctly cited as one of the key weaknesses of the Russian aristocracy. At the core of feudalism was the contract mutually binding on monarch and aristocracy. In more concrete form feudalism bequeathed estate institutions which were the forebears of representative government and which operated on the principle that the king was subject to law and could not tax his subjects without their consent. Though the lack of such institutions and concepts did indeed make the Russian elites very vulnerable to an autocrat's whims, one should not, however, forget the other side of the picture. In 1763 the Russian bureaucracy was barely larger than the Prussian and far worse educated.[17] Most German princes governed states which were tiny by Russian standards and could employ a swathe of university-educated officials, many of whom studied courses in cameralism in educational institutions which had existed since medieval times. Russia's first university was founded in 1755. Even in 1800 the number of state high schools (gymnazii) was pitiful. Inevitably therefore the crown was very dependent on the provincial landowner, whom Paul I called the state's involuntary police chief and tax collector in the village. Moreover, as many eighteenth-century monarchs discovered, emperors who annoyed the Petersburg aristocracy were liable to be overthrown and murdered in palace coups.
14
The whole discussion of the bureaucratic elite is derived from Lieven,
15
The classic work on the noble origins of the Russian intelligentsia remains M. Raeff,
As regards Russian and Ottoman elites and the contextsin which they operated, for example, compare Potemkin (see S. Sebag Montefiore,
16
In general on the early Ching, see W J. Peterson (ed.),
17
R. E. Jones,
S. V Mironenko,